Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

‘He's not hurt, is he?’

‘I don't think so.’

‘He does that sometimes,’ she said.

And at six, home from school an hour before, Ella drove her away in the car. Her mixture of devotion and an uncaring lack of interest was beyond me. I suppose I had sentimental ideas about motherhood in those days or just my own mother as an example. An hour had passed and John shuffled off to his bedroom. I followed him after allowing him time to get undressed. When I came into the room he was in the act of arranging dice, ballpoint, plaster, green bottle and the rest on his bedside table and took no notice of me. He hadn't uttered a word, in my hearing at least, since we came back from our walk.

Mrs Cosway had left me the barbiturate tablet ready in the glass dish. I held it out to him exactly as she did but he shook his head, turned over on his side and pulled the quilt over him.

I said, ‘Your pill, John,’ but he didn't answer and I saw he was already asleep.

It was still broad daylight and the room was as light as it ever was. Although I knew Mrs Cosway disliked drawn curtains, I went to the window to pull them across but before I got there I noticed on top of the piano a framed photograph of four girls, taken perhaps twenty years before. One of them, plain-faced and spotty but just recognizable as Zorah, was in an unflattering school uniform. Ida looked much as she did today, careworn and harassed from self-imposed duties, Winifred and Ella both very pretty, brightly smiling. A middle-aged man in the picture I supposed must be the late Mr Cosway, father of this family, handsome and with an unexpectedly sensitive face. John was not there. Could he have taken this photograph?

I drew the curtains, picked up Johns discarded clothes from the floor and went out into the hall. Zorah was standing there as if waiting for me. She looked at the shirt and socks and underwear I was holding.

‘Why do you have to do that?’

‘Someone has to.’

‘My mother will be hours. Where she's gone she won't hurry back.’ She was dressed to go out, her car keys in her hand, but she lingered. ‘John never used to be like that,’ she said, ‘like he's in a dream all the time, never saying a word, clumsy and stumbling about. What do you think is really wrong with him?’

I said I didn't know but no doubt his doctor did. She laughed. She opened the front door and slammed it behind her. The house shook. I wondered what her laughter meant and then where she was going and whom she was meeting. In spite of what her daughter had said, Mrs Cosway came back in the Volvo half an hour later. Perceptive enough to notice that I had expected her to be out longer, Ella said, though unasked, ‘She only went to the doctor's.’

Mrs Cosway followed her in, opened her bag and dropped a piece of paper on the hall table before passing on into the drawing room. Considering where she had been, for me to have kept from glancing at it would have been impossible. I had no pangs of conscience to struggle with.

It was a prescription for high-dose phenobarbitone and another drug called Largactil. I had completely forgotten what Largactil was for. If I wanted to identify it I would have to find a dictionary of medicines in the public library at Colchester or Sudbury and look it up. I had decided to say nothing to Mrs Cosway about John's refusal to take the barbiturate from me. He was asleep, would very probably stay asleep, and if he didn't and she asked me, I would admit my failure. I could see no reason for his going to bed at seven any more than I could for the afternoon walks. It was Ella who, that very evening, came to sit next to me and explain, though I hadn't asked her. This was the beginning of her overtures of friendship to me.

‘You and I are nearer to each other in age than you are to the others,’ she said in a cosy, all-girls-together voice, though Zorah's age was nearer to mine and even then not very near. ‘I know you've been wondering what's the point of you going on those walks with John and I thought I'd enlighten you.

‘The fact is he wants it that way. John, I mean. He insists on that walk. You try stopping him. It's this compulsion thing he has. Just like he must arrange those things he carries about in his pocket and he must cut his bread up in patterns and turn his eggshell the other way up, so he has to go on that walk. If it's absolutely pouring and he can't go he'll make an awful fuss, you'll see.’

I nodded and said I had to thank her for letting me borrow a book from her room.

‘Any time,’ she said and, ‘you're welcome,’ which English people hardly ever said then. ‘Did my mother show you the library?’

I said she had mentioned it but I understood the door was kept locked.

‘That's a lot of silly nonsense,’ said Ella. ‘I'll show it to you some time. It's quite interesting.’

‘A lot of rare books?’

‘Well, a lot of books . I don't know about rare. That's not what it's interesting for but you'll see.’ Ella was fond of telling me that I would see and I usually did in time. ‘I've a feeling you and I are going to be friends, Kerstin. I'd like that.’

Of course I had to say that I would too and I had begun to feel kindly disposed towards this pretty woman who was so obviously insecure and self-doubting. But my thoughts were concentrated on the prescription Mrs Cosway had brought back from the doctor, and suddenly, while Ella continued to talk, this time about her school and her problems with form Five B, the elusive definition came to me. Largactil was a preparation of a powerful drug called chlorpromazine hydrochloride and it was used to treat patients undergoing behavioural disturbances or who are psychotic. It also allayed severe anxiety. It therefore seemed quite a reasonable medication for the schizophrenic John Cosway.

7

I became obsessed with the diary. The physical part of it, the leather-bound book, had been given to me by a friend for my birthday and when it first arrived I thought it the least useful present I received. I had never kept a diary, I had never expressed a wish to keep one or regrets for not doing so. But here it was, a handsome volume, a couple of hundred pages thick inside its cover of red leather and gilt, and it found its way into my suitcase because of its looks and as something to put in the pocket on the inside of the lid.

I began to write in it only, at first, to describe the countryside and Lydstep Old Hall, having a feeling that a record of this place might be useful to me in later years. After that came descriptions of the occupants of the house, and once I had begun on their characters and conversations I was hooked. Sometimes I could hardly wait to escape from the drawing room and the company when the old black and white television was on, its grainy picture rippling and rolling, and Mrs Cosway gazing at it grimly, to go upstairs, open the diary and begin to write.

If I had been in her place or if I had been any of the others, I would have hated the very idea of it, as she did and they did when they found out. In my defence I can say I tried to be charitable and fair in what I wrote and of course I never dreamt that the time would come when I would hand this chronicle of events at Lydstep Old Hall to the police. Not the least idea of what was to come entered my mind when I committed my observations and thoughts to those pages. If anyone had warned me that they would be read by police officers and psychiatrists I wouldn't have believed it. Unless it is lent or stolen, what circumstances can there be in which a private diary is read by others? Only perhaps, as in this case, when what it records supplies evidence of a crime. I had no choice but to offer it to the police, though I have to say that there was no coercion and I gave it up to them willingly.